As of 030210, each object window in the full editor has a two-line panel at the bottom that shows:
- The number of users who are viewing the object. A tooltip on this label shows the names of the users. This label is on the top row, left justified.
- The name of the object owner, followed by the words "read" and "write" in either red or green, depending on the current user's access permissions to the object. A tooltip over each of the read and write labels gives details. Double-clicking the label opens the permisisons editor dialog. This label is right-justified on the top row.
- The URL of the object. Double-clicking causes the client to attempt to load the object in the default web browser. This (potentially) takes up the entire bottom row of the label.
After using this design for 8 months or so, a number of issues have been identified:
- The URL cannot be selected an copied. It is currently implemented as a JLabel, which does not support selection. Possible solutions include:
- Switching to a JTextField. This might look a little odd, though removing the standard JTextField border would make it look more like a label. Another issue is the formatting of the URL itself. Currently the displayed URL includes spaces, which must be replaced by "+" signs before the string can be used as a URL. (Of course, displaying the usable, though somewhat uglier, url might be a better idea anyway.)
- Supporting copy/paste in a popup menu and/or drag-and-drop on the JLabel. This would allow us to display spaces and export +'s.
- Supporting dragging the text out of the JLabel. (implemented 030301, though it appears to only work on osx)
- The user count label makes inefficient use of space and is tedious to use if monitoring a set of people. Possible enhancements include:
- Showing actual user names, up to the space alloted to the label. Beyond that a count could be shown. This should not be significantly more expensive than the current behavior required to generate a tooltip with the list.
- Providing controls for showing and hiding a user list attached to the frame, like the one that is shown when an object is launched from a backquoted link on a web page.
- Showing the owner name is problematic for a number of reasons. It should probably just be removed (was removed 030301):
- It potentially discourages collaborative work, since it appears to assign individual ownership to an object that may be jointly owned.
- It does not acurately reflect who can see/edit an object. (Consider the case where a user creates an object, and then read permissions on the object's directory are changed to deny him access.)
- It tends to frequently be set to a VT person's user id, since we tend to do the initial setup of user and project directories.
- The read/write permissions indicators do not give enough information for the space they consume. The read indicator is particularly useless, since if you can't read the object, the window will say "this object is restricted". A more valuable use of this space would seem to be something that gives more insight into what other people can do with the object, since accidentally restricted permissions seem to be an occasional problem. Salient indication of unwritable objects, on the other hand, is useful, and should be preserved in any revisions to the UI. Possible solutions include:
- Replace worked "read" and "write" with icons (eyes and a pencil?) to save space. A red line over the icon could represent restriction on the current user.
- Indicate one of several discrete categories for read and write permissions, such as "by you" ("by me"?), "by some", "by all". (implemented 030301. icons would still be a nice addition)
- Indicate cases where permissions are delegated to the parent directory, or perhaps cases where they are not. This would make it easier to avoid accidently over-restricting or under-restricting a particular object. (Implemented as arrow icons 030302)
- The panel is sometimes just too large, e.g., on workspace-based applications. A reasonable solution would be to allow the panel to be collapsed down to a single line (just the URL?).
- Last modification user and time are currently not shown. We might want to avoid showing last mod user (for the same reason that we don't show owner name), but show last modification time (with user on a tooltip) might be useful.
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